“Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“She felt his personality to be round and smooth and free from nasty spikes.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The cicadas, as if they were wired on the same circuit, suddenly filled the garden with a loud burst of celebration.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“Years later when she was being eccentric, had shed her corset and let her arse spread unhindered by anything but her perpetual dressing gown.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“The most puzzling thing in the entire encounter occurred at a certain stage very late in the conversation, when she discovered she had been talking to a man. She had the feeling of a dream where things and people transmogrify, characters dissolve from one to the other like tricks in a film, monsters in a bottle. She had the sense, the very distinct sense, of her companion's female gender; she had been pleased to find it, had relaxed into it, had been even more delighted to find it coupled with an elegant wit and a sense of both joy and irony. The forces of life, she thought to herself, are flying high tonight.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
“There are problems with the wombat," Nathan Schick said. "I was interested in wombats in '29. I went up to your zoo in Sydney and looked at the wombat. The fellow said you could train them but God, Herbie, no offence... Lee-Anne... but the wombat is not star quality.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Illywhacker
Peter Carey
Born place: in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
Born date May 7, 1943
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“It always gets late with you. - Is that a compliment?”
― quote from The Price of Salt
“A rack of mugs rested alongside. There were two hand-drawn labels affixed to the decanters. “Happy Tea!” read one, above a drawing of a wide-eyed, grinning Human with frizzy hair standing on end. “Boring Tea,” read the other. The Human drawn there looked content, but indifferent.”
― Becky Chambers, quote from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
“You know, there is only one letter's difference between lonely and lovely," I told him once when he was down. "There is only one letter's difference between loner and loser," he retorted.”
― quote from Torture the Artist. Joey Goebel
“Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before. This is the case even when the experimenter tells the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact. The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.”
― David Eagleman, quote from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
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The Healer's Apprent...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
